Weekly Greenhouse Gas Estimation

Dynamic Data: Weekly GDP tracker

Weekly Updated GDP change estimate by OECD: https://www.oecd.org/economy/weekly-tracker-of-gdp-growth/

The variable Change is defined as the percent change of last week's GDP compared to the same week of the pre-pandemic year. It can be conceptually equivalent to the following, although actual process of calculation is a bit more complicated:

\begin{align*} y_{i,0} &= \textrm{Weekly GDP of the week i of THIS year, measured at PRE-pandemic price level}\\ y_{i,pre} &= \textrm{Weekly GDP of the week i of PRE-pandemic year}\\ \textrm{Change} &= \frac{y_{i,0} - y_{i,pre}}{y_{i,pre}} \quad (\textrm{in percentage}) \end{align*}

Under the hood, the OECD tracker is trained with the real-GDP changes, and thus it returns the real change, not the nominal change.

Here are the list of countries being tracked and estimated. However, the frequency of the tracking is not the same for all countries.

A helper function to return the n_sundays number of date strings of the beginning of the most recent weeks for which the data is available.

We have to filter only the relevant portion of the original raw excel file, which is huge.

Static Data 1: Greenhouse Gas

The collected data on greenhouse gas emission is in the unit of CO2 equivalent tonnes during the years from 2015 to 2019, which are the past five years prior to the pandemic. The data is from the OECD: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AIR_GHG

Ideally, we would like to use the values over many years to remove random fluctuations. However, the data from too many years ago would not be relevant. We thought the past five pre-pandemic years would be a good trade-off.

Static Data 2: Gross Domestic Product

The real GDP for each countries during the same set of years is collected. The data is from the IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD

This is an inflation-adjusted measure of GDP, which is different from non-adjusted measure of nominal GDP.

IMF real GDP graph

Static Model: GH Gas vs. GDP

Here is a model that predicts the greenhouse gas emission from the GDP for each country.

Static Model Data

Static Model Fitting

Static Model Prediction Function

Dynamic Prediction